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Etching Back to the Mainstream

By Andrew Rosenthal April 11, 2012 12:36 pmApril 11, 2012 12:36 pm

Now that Rick Santorum has cleared Mitt Romney’s calendar for the rest of the pre-convention season, the presumptive nominee and the Republican Party can straighten out their strategy for the general election.

If they actually want to win in the fall, they have to give the vast majority of American voters who don’t participate in Republican primaries a reason to vote for Mr. Romney that is more substantial than badly sung lyrics from “America the Beautiful,” dog-whistle lines about President Obama’s patriotism, and a relentless attack on women’s rights. They need to find a way to Etch A Sketch back from the fringe—and fast. BuzzFeed published polling data Wednesday showing that Mr. Romney is the first non-incumbent since 1996 headed for a major party’s nomination with a net negative rating among voters at this point in the campaign.
Mr. Romney might try coming up with an actual plan for economic recovery instead of droning on in a faux-Reagan way about trickle-down economics. That’s unlikely to happen, though, since he seems to believe, genuinely, in the merits of keeping taxes low for the very rich.

He could also consider dropping the venomous anti-gay anti-abortion anti-woman social agenda that permeated the Republican primaries. Falling in with the party line by, just for instance, joining in the assault on Planned Parenthood cost him a lot, especially among women. In January, Mr. Obama had an edge of 8 percentage points over Mr. Romney among women voters. Now it’s 23 percentage points, with 60 percent of women favoring the president.

But Mr. Romney won’t find it easy to discard his primary positions. Erik Eckholm reported in the Times today that evangelical leaders will urge Mr. Romney to build a fall strategy based on firing up the hard-right base in states like Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said that Mr. Romney must “demonstrate a genuine and solid commitment to the core values issues.”

If he wants, Mr. Santorum could give his former rival a hand with evangelicals. Using his hard-right social bona fides, he could encourage Mr. Perkins and others to give Mr. Romney some space in the name of defeating the Democrats.

Or the Republicans can go for the nuclear option. They can give up on molding their candidate back into someone resembling a centrist, consolidate all those tens of millions of dollars in super PAC money (without any coordination of course) and use it to destroy Mr. Obama – through ads that distort his policies, question his patriotism, and accuse him of being a Muslim and a Marxist.

It would leave the country even more divided and bruised and fearful and angry than it is now. But hey, you gotta break a few eggs, right?